The exhibition YOUR WATER OUR WATER presents artistic works from ten different countries that deal with historical and ecological contexts in relation to the Danube and other bodies of water. The paintings, sculptures, photographs and video works on display explore the interactions between industry and the river landscape, examine human-water relations and deal with water as a metaphor for transformation and renewal. The title of the transnational project alludes to the interconnectedness of all water systems and the bordering cultural spaces.

“No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.” Haeraclitus’ famous saying invites us to reflect on identity. If we allow ourselves to consider the river not as a geographic formation, but as a metaphor for the course of life, we come across the core of every existence: constant change and renewal. Water is constantly flowing into the river, the water changes its course, there are dams and rapids. No movement of the river water equals another. People also change over time and every moment shapes them anew. There are no identical moments and no anchoring in a rigid past. Everything is a living movement in the here and now, in the constant flow of time.

József Tasnádi (HUN) takes up this same idea with his installation Iteration (2023). There are a multitude of wooden ships in vacuum bags on the floor. Each piece seems to resemble its neighbor, but the objects are not identical simply because they were made at different times. Tasnádi uses a thought experiment from antiquity here – the “Ship of Theseus” invented by Plutarch. The king of Athens owned a ship that was constantly being repaired over time. One by one, each damaged part was replaced until no original element remained. So the question arises: is it still the same ship? And applied to us as individuals: does our identity remain the same if every cell in our body renews itself over time or if our values change over our lifespan? The “Ship of Theseus” reminds us that identity lies not only in material substance, but in the continuity of a story and in the meaning we attribute to ourselves within it. Tasnádi’s “River of Ships” provides a metaphorical representation of repeating units. The artist sees identity as something that eludes our complete understanding and can thus be interpreted as a vacuum of comprehension.

As the longest river in Europe, the Danube runs through the landscape like a blue ribbon, carrying with it secrets and tales of times gone by. Numerous fates are linked to its course. In her video installation Maria Josefin Margarete (2019), viewers are guided through the life stories of the great-grandmother, grandmother and great-aunt of the artist Om Bori (DE). Although the lives of the three women are separated by different eras, regimes and national borders, they are connected by certain events and places. It is above all the Danube, the great “Mother River” of Central Europe, that brings their fates into an imaginary and real connection. Change and return, two essential characteristics of a river, also characterize the non-linear narrative of the video sequences. They tell of the cyclical process of experiencing events, their transmission through memory and their return into a younger generation.

The Danube is also the inspiration for a number of political and popular narratives. For his work The world according to Danube (2024), Uroš Pajović (SRB) brings together the many roles that the Danube plays in European and global political, popular and everyday culture in a trilingual newspaper. The individual articles in German, Hungarian and Serbian focus on the Danube and its connection to the topics of nationhood, migration, science fiction and environmental issues. Pajović points out the multi-layered entanglements and conflicts of cultures and societies that are “touched” by the course of the river. The individual newspaper copies can be taken along by the visitors to spread the stories about the Danube beyond the exhibition space.

As a fluid element that reflects light and releases vacation associations, water is a suitable motif in the hashtag culture of social media. The starting point for Ráchel Jutka’s (SVK) painting VitaminSea II (2022) is a search for the next, supposedly appealing “Instagram moment”, for the aesthetic essence of banal tourist photos by the sea. In a second step, she transfers the found photo detail, a view of shallow water over a sandy ground, onto an unprimed canvas. This highlights a special property of water: the element is able to shift the proximity and distance of what is seen, similar to a magnifying glass. Jutka’s work Quelle (2023) deals with the topography of bodies of water and is based on a historical map of the Štiavnické vrchy, a mountain region in Slovakia. Drawn by German settlers in the 19th century, it shows many small mining lakes that filled with water after the raw materials were extracted. The approach to the painting Riverbed (2020-22) is completely different. Here, an old hemp canvas found by the artist was placed on the banks of the Hornád River, a tributary of the Danube, and pressed to the bottom. This allowed the shapes of mud, water and stones to inscribe themselves into the textile and form a basis for color accents and drawing elements that were added later.

Whirls, reefs and rocky banks hidden beneath the surface of the water characterized the riverbed of the “old”, original Danube, especially at the level of the Iron Gate, the breakthrough of the river through the southern Carpathians. Navigation here was laborious and from the early 19th century a number of important engineers attempted to regulate the Danube, straightening and deepening the riverbed to create ports and power stations. Against the backdrop of today’s opposing approaches to renaturalizing the Danube, the artist duo Deep Time Agency (NL/NOR) introduces us to three “founding fathers” of the modern Danube. In their work Floating Fathers (2024), they introduce the idea of using so-called “tree spurs”; dead trees that are artificially placed in the river to create breeding grounds for animals. In the three wooden sculptures hanging from the ceiling, the portraits of the once mighty engineers merge with the material entity of the tree spurs.

In 1986, the region around the Iron Gate was flooded in order to build a large hydropower plant on the border between Serbia and Romania and to facilitate navigation. A new, massive dam raised the water level upstream by 35 meters. A number of villages and islands sank into the water, including the legendary island of Ada Kaleh, which was originally inhabited by a Muslim minority. The island, described by the Ottomans as the “key to Serbia, Hungary and Romania”, was first mentioned by Herodotus and was fought over by the Austrian and the Ottoman Empires for over two centuries. In his multimedia project From Centuries Ago to Eons to Come (2017-21), Lucian Bran (ROU) connects the vanished island with a newly created “Danube Island” in the Black Sea. His two light boxes show photographs of the new land formation and the former location of Ada Kaleh. From here, the Danube transports sediments downstream to Musura Bay. Bran’s large-format photograph Whirlpool, Sulina rivermouth (2017) captures the mixing of the dark soil brought by the river with the yellowish sand of the Black Sea. Since the early 2000s, the alluvial sediments have been creating a new island further out at sea, which is currently divided between Ukraine and Romania. His work Reverse Archeology (2021) comprises three vase models from Greek, Dacian and Turkish cultural history, which the artist produced using a 3D printer and then sank in Mangalia on the Black Sea for six months. All three cultures lived on Ada Kaleh. The title Reverse Archeology refers to the idea of what artifacts from the future Insula K might look like.

The Danube is the only major river in Europe that flows from west to east. The force of the water not only enables the transfer of sediment, but also flushes sewage and waste downstream. With her work Bloom (2024), created especially for the exhibition, Nina Ivanović (SRB) presents us with the shape of a section of the Danube through Belgrade. The form, cut from sheet metal, was soaked in liquid fertilizer containing various nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen. The chemical elements react with the metal and form their own structure, which changes over the course of the exhibition. White, crystalline forms blossom on the surface. In the Danube, however, the interaction of metals, iron and phosphorus contained in the river water leads to algal blooms and subsequently to dead zones, i.e. areas in which neither flora or fauna remain in the water.

In their photographic series Alex. Vallée de la Roya (2020-22), Thérèse Verrat & Vincent Toussaint (FR) capture the storm-devastated landscapes of the Roya Valley, a region in the Alpes-Maritimes. The images of the forever-changed riverbed reflect the interplay of chaos and beauty in these contemporary ruins. Their work reveals a fascination with fractured landscapes, seen as ghostly, disembodied scenes that evoke a sense of timeless calm. The artists act as both documenters and archaeologists, extracting motifs from the land that emphasize the aesthetic value of shape, color, and material. They activate these elements in a way that creates a dialogue between formality and sensuality, elevating the ordinary into the extraordinary and inviting viewers to find beauty amid devastation.

In their video installation Compositions of Flow (2023-24), artists Tonka Maleković (CRO) and Sophia Freidhoff (AT) offer viewers a view down onto the Danube from a historic bridge. As the water flows past a massive pillar, it creates an impression of movement, even though solid ground remains underfoot. This interplay between movement and standstill evokes the inner conflict that migrants often face when contemplating the decision to leave their home country. To what extent does emigration improve their lives? And what alternatives might exist? The video projection includes excerpts from interviews conducted during a two-year research project on labor migration in the Danube region. The title of the work refers to the human rights concept of freedom of movement and highlights the ambivalence between the theoretical ideal and the subjective experiences of migrants.

Bottle caps, clothespins, an old flip-flop. In addition to wastewater and fertilizers, everyday plastic objects also end up in the Danube and begin their journey downstream. Michael Heindl (AT) links the short useful life of plastic objects with the moment of their disposal and notes: “There is a considerable imbalance. This is because the actual, extended existence of the objects only begins after they have become waste. Consistently out of place, partly broken, they lead their own lives as disruptive elements that appear unexpectedly in the natural environment. For his video work Afterlives (2023), Heindl collected a series of washed-up plastic utensils on the beaches of the Romanian Danube Delta. He then staged the found objects in the form of small, subversive interventions in Vienna’s public space. The humorous sequences remind us that everyday life can always be a territory of resistance, if only we intervene in the flow of daily life and make small shifts in everyday things.

Finally, one of the collective works will be presented as part of the micro-project Reflections on the Danube, initiated by artist and member of the U10 Collective, Iva Kuzmanović, under the auspices of U10 Art Space. The work involves each interested participant and friend of the project referencing their experiences, conclusions, or associations related to their participation in the project YOUR WATER, OUR WATER through text, drawings, or by using shape as a medium. Their graphic designs will be engraved on mirrors of various shapes and installed in public spaces at different locations along the Danube River in Belgrade, the site of the final exhibition and gathering for the project.

Hanna Weber